This Masterclass which is spread over three sessions, will outline and substantiate the claim that, 150 years now from the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume One (the only volume completed by the author in his lifetime), the necessity of a ‘critique of political economy’ is more evident than ever, but requires a drastic new formulation. This is not to be conceived in the ‘historicist’ mode of rectifying Marx’s analyses in the light of ‘recent’ developments in the capitalist economy and its social conditions, but, more radically, in the form of a ‘critique of the critique’ that addresses basic epistemological obstacles in Marx’s conceptual apparatus, and a rethinking of the relationship of capitalism with historical time. It is meant to contribute to answering the vexing question: how to reinvent politics when the capitalist economy has produced a real neutralization of the political.

Session 3: Alternative readings of the current transformations of capitalism as a world-system and a generalized mode of valorization suggest the ‘end’, not of capitalism per se, but of ‘historical capitalism’, the great transformation of class societies and nation-states into the highly unstable regime of ‘absolute capitalism’.

Gary S. Becker: Human Capital and the Personal Distribution of Income: An Analytical Approach, The Woytinski Lecture N. 1, Institute of Public Administration and Department of Economics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1967

David Harvey: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Oxford University Press 2014.

Robert Meister: “Liquidity” (Chapter 4 of Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies, edited by Benjamin Lee and Randy Martin, The University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Immanuel Wallerstein et al.: Does Capitalism Have a Future? Oxford University Press 2013.

Etienne Balibar, born 1942, was a student and collaborator of Louis Althusser with whom (and other friends) he co-authored Reading Capital in 1965. He has taught at Universities and Research Centers in France, Algeria, The Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, the United States of America, the United Kingdom. Currently Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London, and Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York. His most recent publications (in English) are: Equaliberty. Political Essays (Duke University Press), Violence and Civility. On the Limits of Political Philosophy (Columbia University Press), Citizenship (Polity), Citizen Subject. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (Fordham University Press).